If you had a time Machine, where and when would you go?
It’s a parlor game that’s been played for ages. Ancient Rome. 1920’s Paris. Italy during the Renaissance (but with penicillin). A lot of the time, one’s answer revolves around music. People want to be there for the birth of something.
Maybe you would choose New York in 1977, to sweat to the Ramones and Blondie at CBGB’s, then head uptown for revel in birth of disco at Studio 54. Or early 90s Seattle, for the birth of grunge, sweating in the pit for Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Mudhoney and Soundgarden.
Maybe the Bronx in 1973, for DJ Kool Herc’s block parties where Hip Hop was born.
Or London in 1966, with the Beatles and the Stones, a visit to the Bag o’Nails club to see Jimi Hendrix rock Eric Clapton’s world.
People are playing the game a lot today. Because we yearn for a time before cell phone cameras and social media. A time where you got into the club with a physical ticket, and just let the music flood over you in the moment.
And this summer, they are setting their mythical Time Machine for 1994 Manchester. The Madchester scene was still alive, but making way for a brash band from Burnage in Manchester with a front man who took the stage at the Hacienda and dared to say it was about time a “proper band” played the venue.
Oasis was raw and working class. Two brothers from a council house (public housing as we call it in America). “Is it worth the aggravation,” Noel wrote and Liam sang “to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for.”
That was something being felt by millions of young men.
Unlike the Beatles, whose crowd makeup at concerts skewed female, Oasis had a largely male following. They faced the uncertainty. Many were on the dole, receiving public assistance. They didn’t want to grow up. They wanted to rage. This was not like punk or ska, both relatively small culture sets. This seemed to be everyone. Terrace lads and bricklayers and postmen, all trying to scrape out a life after 15 years of Margaret Thatcher. And going to an Oasis show was like a going to football match where everyone was supporting the same club.
The crowds got bigger. And the music did to match. No one posting on social media. No one holding a cellphone in the air. The only thing the crowd had in their hands was a pint and a momentary touch of a beach ball.
Across the pond, the American males were reeling from the loss of Kurt Cobain and the end of grunge. Lives were about to be upended by the internet, and a presidential scandal.
The crowds were smaller in the US–arenas instead of stadiums. The band had ruined their entree into the states after a drug-addled performance in Los Angeles which broke up the band for a week when older brother Noel escaped to San Francisco only to return a week later.
But the music and the words resonated.
It was grand.
Alas, there is no time machine. 1994 is long gone. There is no way to go back.
But you don’t have to go back. Because 2025 Manchester and London and New York and Los Angeles and Dublin will now take their place in the time machine conversation.
The shows for the 2025 reunion tour are not trying to take you back in time. This IS the time. It is something new. And it’s something possibly more important than the birth of Brit Pop.
“We need to find another word, because this ain’t just ‘nostalgia,’” co-opener Richard Ashcroft recently told Virgin Radio. “That city and that stage, Like Croke Park the other night. It was like the center of the Universe. It was the most now, happening real place you could be on the planet.”
Damn the cell phones and social media. Damn the AI and impending doom. For one night, 80,000 people gathered together to sing songs and embrace each other.
This isn’t nostalgia. Because this never happened before. Eighty thousand people never turned away from the stage, locked arms to do the Poznan together. Thousands of people never gathered outside the parks and stadiums to just listen to the songs. They are there for the music, but more to just be around each other. Because this is a communal event, and the collective effervescence created from each individual is something that cannot be replicated through a pair of earbuds.
This never happened before. Because the young men of the 90s who survived DID all get jobs, even though there seemingly was nothing worth working for.
They survived. They saw their friends die from drugs or drink. Or go to jail. And now they face the uncertainty of life in their 40s and 50s and 60s of not having a retirement plan, and their kids not earning what they did. But they are here, now, facing that uncertainty in an embrace with both perfect strangers and imperfect friends.
This never happened before. Two brothers who each represent the two sides of man–Noel, the loner poet with the acerbic wit in the vein of Oscar Wilde and Liam, the cocky, hooligan town crier–putting their past behind them in front of 70,000 people. The cynic will say it’s all for the money. But their hug at the end of the show plants a seed in everyone in the crowd: Yes, we might live forever, but life is also short. Pick up the phone and reach to that friend who you lost touch with over this or that.
This is not the birth of something new. It has never happened before. It’s for the teenagers in crowd bouncing up and down to “Some Might Say.” The twenty somethings arm in arm singing “Don’t Look Back in Anger” to each other. And those middle-aged men thirty years later with families of their own, who can look back and realize they did finally find something worth living for. All together, arm in arm in the face of a new age.
Let’s just pray that new age has guitars.
